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Lifestyles for Learning: The Essential Guide for College Students and the People Who Love Them
Lifestyles for Learning: The Essential Guide for College Students and the People Who Love Them
Lifestyles for Learning: The Essential Guide for College Students and the People Who Love Them
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Lifestyles for Learning: The Essential Guide for College Students and the People Who Love Them

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College is risky business. Life is hurled into never-before imagined freedom, independence, and choice. For many students, college brings challenges and changes in nearly every area of lifephysical, physiological, emotional, social, residential, financial, spiritual, and sexual. College may well be the most volatile time in a person’s life.

Attending college is bad for your health. Statistically, young adults face more depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and drug addiction than in any other time in their lives. Schizophrenia emerges most often during this time. Suicide rate is highest between 1621 years. A college student’s lifestyle is a potential threat to their successful academic performance.

The good news is that, with the right tools, students can create a college experience that is healthy, successful, and fits their own unique selves. Lifestyles for Learning explores the direct relationship between academic performance and key lifestyle factors: food, sleep, stress, movement, creativity, connection, addiction, and giving. It further discusses how lifestyle factors are challenged by learning disabilities and other co-occurring diagnoses, such as ADHD and behavioral disorders. Lifestyles for Learning offers guidance to prepare every college student for success.

Peppered with humorous anecdotes and warm-hearted wisdom, this is important reading for students entering college, as well as for parents, educators, counselors, doctors, psychologists, and educational consultants. It is also designed for supplemental reading in college and high school courses.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherSkyhorse
Release dateAug 4, 2015
ISBN9781634508582
Lifestyles for Learning: The Essential Guide for College Students and the People Who Love Them
Author

Susan Crowther

Susan Crowther is the author of The No Recipe Cookbook, The Vegetarian Chef, and Lifestyles for Learning. Chef Henin taught Susan at the Culinary Institute of America. Susan has worn several professional hats: cook, chef, caterer, nutritionist, massage therapist, health educator, college professor, and mother. Susan and her husband Mark recently moved from Vermont to Elizabethton, Tennessee.

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    Lifestyles for Learning - Susan Crowther

    THE CULTURE OF COLLEGE

    I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.

    —Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

    College has become too abstract. People need to be learning how to do things, rather than be forced to contemplate abstract concepts, graduating devoid of any practical skills. Too many kids aren’t learning how to work.

    —Temple Grandin, on college

    College has given me the confidence I need to fail.

    —Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title

    Welcome to college: the best and worst thing you will ever do in your life. Forget the ads and promises; you have no idea what you’re getting into. College hurls students into never-before imagined freedom, independence, and choice. Freedom comes at a cost, tantalizing students with unprecedented opportunities to manipulate and compromise every area of their young adult lives.

    A college student is the Phoenix Rising. The child in you collides with the adult you will become. Everything shatters: identity, personality, philosophy, monogamy … you name it, it changes. Every aspect of development is knocked off balance: physical, physiological, emotional, social, residential, financial, psychological, and spiritual. There are surely a few more -als: cultural, financial, geographical, vocational, sexual … in short, auto-biographical. Name an area of life, and college challenges it. College may well be the singularly most volatile time in a person’s life.

    It’s supposed to be. The goal of college is to create what late educator John Dewey called "disequilibrium"—a knocking off balance, challenging one’s patterns and paradigms, in order to grow. That is a required part of the academic experience. Surely, all education encourages disequilibrium, but college imbalances everything. College reshapes our world, and it is a spectacular transformation; however, without guidance, it may be as terrifying as a bad hallucinogenic trip lasting for years.

    Attending college is bad for your health. All lifestyle factors come under attack: eating habits, daily movement, sleep cycles, social support, creative outlets, and coping strategies. Chemicals in the body change dramatically, with substance experimentation and medication modification. Sexual activity explodes, accompanied by sexually-transmitted diseases, love, and unplanned pregnancies. College is a breeding ground for untamed bacterial and viral havoc. Students herd into health services, documenting illness rates that rival epidemics. College is the opposite of a healthy lifestyle: mentally disorienting, physically disturbing, emotionally draining, and and soul crushing.

    Statistically, young adults face more depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and drug addiction than in any other time in their lives. Schizophrenia, the debilitating disease of delusion, emerges most often in young adult years. Suicide rate is highest in young adults between the ages 16-21. It’s no accident that young adults pay the highest car insurance rates. A college student’s lifestyle is a potential viable threat to their survival and, certainly, to their successful academic performance.

    The career that students have held for thirteen years—attending school—changes drastically. The job description changes and, more importantly, the boss changes. From the nanosecond that parents say goodbye, they are fired. Suddenly the child is in charge, but the promotion comes with two hats: employer and employee.

    The college student is the CEO of her life. Every decision is her own. This may sound empowering, and it is, but it is also devastating. At the same time she becomes her own boss, she loses her office manager and personal assistant—the great and powerful Mommy. Every single task of her daily life, managed until that kiss goodbye, is now up to her. That kiss changes everything.

    * * *

    With the new job title comes a new identity. College students are systematically interrogated and expected to have all the answers:

    What’s your major?

    What’s your GPA?

    Are you seeing anyone?

    Do you have a part-time job?

    Who’s paying for your education?

    What are your plans after school?

    And, the ever-popular: What are you gonna do with your life?

    College students don’t know where their campus mailbox is, much less what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives. It’s a moot question, anyway. No one knows what he’s going to do with the rest of his life! It’s common for people to major in one field and work in some totally unrelated field. Hardly anyone wears one vocational hat anymore. We play musical chairs, bopping along from one career to the next (when we’re lucky enough to secure employment). Nonetheless, we expect students to identify their paths after receiving their high school diplomas, as if their lives’ vocations are etched in ink next to their names.

    If only it were that tidy, but it’s not. For those who have earned your degrees, think back. Remember college? Mmhm. Okay, now really remember it. Hold on a second. Put down your phone … reflect for a moment. College. Is it all coming back? Just a bit more … Ahh, now you’re there. Now you got it.

    College demands all of you and expects you to defend it. College demands that you know who you are, what you want, and how to get it.

    College is serious stuff.

    BA Is the New GED

    It’s also serious business. Since the twenty-first century, college has become required reading among first-world inhabitants. If you want a good job, you must graduate college. If you want to make money, graduate college. If you want to be happy, graduate college.

    The BA is the new high school diploma, and in fact, the BA is really just a stepping stone to your real degree. If you want to make serious money and be seriously happy, you must acquire at least a Master’s degree. This is the new truth and this truth is well-marketed. College is Big Business—one of the most reliable forms of commodity we currently have in the States, beyond peddling mochaccinos.

    The truth is a myth and fantasy, a Hollywood ending. The ideal of college and its original quest no longer exists: the gathering of bright young wealthy male minds to postpone the eventual settling into Daddy’s company; the finishing place for society women to meet and marry; and later, the melting pot of intellectual curiosity, stirring ideas, beliefs, passions, and social actions. Institutions are transforming, replacing abstract liberal arts degrees with concrete technical training. Online models and distance learning now pervade higher education.

    Regardless of the shape, today’s college is considered prerequisite to making it in the world, securing the perfect career and social status. In the US, college has evolved into a coming-of-age symbol, like a car or trip to Europe. It’s something kids get when they graduate, because they’re supposed to. It’s not only kids who believe this; parents readily embrace this mindset. If you’re good parents, you send your kid to college. The epidemic of college continues to spread, despite the financial and lifestyle burdens it creates.

    At a time when we are outsourcing work opportunities, college is becoming one of the last great domestic products. It’s the last, best toy children receive before they are thrust into the real world. Increasingly, for both parents and their children, college is becoming a place to put off the inevitable, more pause than prepare. College is a holding tank before dealing with the reality of adult life.

    You’d think this overzealous enthusiasm would be due to universal financial accessibility, but nothing is further from the truth. Our nation holds the highest college debt of any westernized country with some of the lowest financial assistance for higher education, while offering the least amount of job security. The only thing a college degree guarantees is student loan debt; still, college graduates earn a sense of entitlement with their degrees. They’re college graduates, for Chrissake—better than a T-shirt Folder at the GAP or ‘Za Slinger at Dominos! Only, they’re not. College students graduate, only to find themselves competing in the workforce for the same jobs as younger, less qualified applicants who make better candidates, because they have lower expectations and are willing to work for less money. If they’re lucky enough to secure a job, college graduates use their hard-earned paychecks to pay down their never-ending student loans.

    The harsh reality is that a college degree no longer implies success. More young adults are applying to, transferring from, and dropping out of college. For those that do graduate, more young adults are unemployed and living at home.

    College is hard enough when you are qualified and prepared, but if you are a student who has learning challenges, attending college is akin to paddling your way out of a tsunami. That does not stop learning-challenged students from applying to college. In fact, their numbers are increasing, becoming an integral part of the higher learning population.

    Learning disability (LD) laws have initiated a surge of support centers and learning accommodations. In addition to accommodations, colleges also institute policy changes: pass/low pass/fail grades and forgiveness policies for failed classes. Critics challenge how assignments are modified and grades inflated. It’s tempting to blame learning-challenged students, but that may be too easy. More likely, expectations have shifted; college is a universally encouraged choice for anyone graduating high school. Some states are implementing free community college incentives. Whatever the reasons, scholarly expectations have been reducing for decades. Graduating from college isn’t the rigor it used to be.

    Colleges are becoming the thing they once loathed—degree factories. However, this should not be viewed as a stigma. Factories are places that manufacture a product. In this case, the factory manufactures a degree. It’s not an evil conspiracy, but rather, good business sense. If more learning-challenged students are coming of age, and more non-traditional students are applying to college, then colleges need rebranding to accommodate new demands. For busy people, veterans, working parents, and distance learners, online and for-profit schools have burgeoned on the scene.

    In a business model, when the customer changes, the product often follows suit. Colleges currently follow business models and are transparent about this shift. Following a business model, colleges modify expectations in order to keep the customer happy. If a student fails, college revenue fails. Schools receive funding for graduation rates, versus enrollment. Colleges, like all businesses in a shaky economy, shift from being product-driven to profit-driven. It’s not solely the colleges’ fault; all businesses rely on creative problem-solving to stay afloat. Our economy drives our motivation.

    The problem isn’t that colleges now embrace business models nor is it that expectations are changing. The problem comes when people buy a product that they cannot afford and do not use. College students’ minds are garages filled with expensive unused toys. During a recent presentation, Temple Grandin, popular learning disabilities advocate, summed it up candidly: "College has become too abstract. People need to be learning how to do things, rather than be forced to contemplate abstract concepts, graduating devoid of any practical skills. Too many kids aren’t learning how to work."

    * * *

    I can hear my students, now. Geez, way to be hating on college, Mrs. C. Guess what? I’m all for college! I went to college. My husband went to college. Our sons went to college. My brother and sister went to college. My folks were educated beyond their Master’s degrees and held professional careers. I teach at a college, for Pete’s sake. I live and breathe higher education.

    But, college is not for everyone. It never was and never will be. For the money it costs versus the outcome it yields and lack of job security it provides, college is no longer viable in many situations. College is certainly not for the person who is unqualified or unprepared. It may not be worth it if attending puts one in debt for the comparable cost of purchasing a house. It is also not worth it if the only reason someone goes is because someone else believes they should go.

    Crazybusy Culture

    What’s happened to the typical college student? How are students different than they were years ago? Every generation experiences dramatic change. Due to its malleable nature, a child’s brain may be neurologically different from his parents’. Brains wire uniquely; this wiring is what psychologists call nurturing. It’s all that life-stuff we do to the brain after nature has formed it. How has the nurturing changed for today’s college students?

    One major change is the family environment. Contemporary home life is completely different than the last generation’s. The nuclear family—spouses who marry, have their own biological children, and remain married—is nearly extinct. These days, it’s more conventional for spouses to divorce than remain married. Many couples have children out of wedlock, and single mothers are the norm. Alternative child-acquisition techniques such as adoption and fertility intervention are commonplace.

    During my Master’s degree program back in 2000, I participated in a student panel, Diversity Within the Family Unit. At the time, I was a divorced mother of two half-brothers and never married the second son’s father. Starkly aware of my colorful predicament, I figured the college invited me as the resident freak.

    How wrong I was. In addition to me, the panel represented: a lesbian couple; a couple whose husband had transgendered into a woman (which might make them a lesbian couple, too); a single mother who had chosen artificial insemination; a couple who had intentionally adopted several severely disabled children; and an elderly couple who were raising their granddaughter, due to their drug-addled daughter’s inability to parent.

    There was one freak show representing. Let’s call her Lisa, since that is not her name. (This is Martha Beck’s joke, from her bestselling memoir, Expecting Adam, and it’s wonderful. Thank you, Martha.) Lisa is a Christian woman who married her high school sweetheart, bore three healthy children, and has remained monogamously married to this day.

    You would’ve thought Lisa entered the panel wearing only edible panties while huffing on a crack pipe. During the Q & A, someone asked Lisa if she was a virgin when they married. Her affirmation caused deep snorts, smirks, and a few indiscreet elbow jabs at neighboring participants. Lisa’s marital virginity and serial monogamy caused a flurry of curiosity. The glaring audience began asking her barbed questions, each one more directed and judgmental than the last. With every hesitation (Lisa is a nice woman, after all), the audience grew more brazen and vindictive. The whole scene felt very lynch-y. I kept scanning the audience, the panel, and Lisa, barely restraining from screaming aloud, Why the hell are you-all getting so upset? She’s the only normal one here!

    Lisa touched a nerve, and remember, this was back in 2000. Since then, family dynamics continue to grow more interesting. Ask any adult in the United States how they are, and they will respond, "Crazybusy. There may be cutesy versions: I don’t have a minute to spare; I don’t have time to breathe; I’ll sleep when I’m dead; I’m out flat, out of control, out of my mind."

    In my generation, people used to be busy. Somewhere between 1980 and 2000, people progressed from busy to crazybusy. Nowadays, being so busy that you incite mental illness isn’t impressive enough to warrant attention. You have to be so busy that you have no time to inhale oxygen into your lungs and exhale carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

    The truth may be that people want to avoid weird people and icky obligations, and the polite way of doing so is to say, Gosh, I’d love to, but I’m busy. Eventually, everybody used that particular nugget. Being busy was no longer a viable excuse, so one had to up the ante, declaring, "Gosh, I’d love to, but I’m crazybusy." Then, in an effort to cover one’s tracks, one had to become crazybusy to make one’s excuses appear legitimate. The moral of this story is to heed the late Kurt Vonnegut’s advice: We are what we pretend to be.

    * * *

    Life is transient and global and constantly changing, and that is an exciting concept; but, in order to create this zesty new world, some things had to give. Extended families are really extended. People can live anywhere in the world, so families have scattered. Where relatives used to stay close—geographically, therefore emotionally—contact is reduced to the occasional yearly visit. Kids grow up without knowing their extended family and learning from them. Kids used to learn how to do things: cook, garden, care for animals, fix cars, and build stuff. They would learn special skills that their families loved: playing music, fishing, skiing, camping, and constructing model trains and planes.

    Family meals have drastically changed. Moms would cook and kids would help, and everyone would eat together. Meals were an opportunity to be together, sharing stories and telling about the day. Mealtime was a communal time to bond, laugh, argue, and resolve issues. Cooking and eating are at the core of our existence, yet are ignored in our modern way of life.

    Eating has taken on a more robotic and dismissive quality these days. Fast food, on-the-go, grab ‘n’ gulp, in-and-out, convenience—these are the phrases that describe our relationship to eating. Today’s meals are in-transit: in the car, on the field, and in rehearsals. Meals are shoved into our bodies on the way to appointments and activities. Eating has taken on a perverse stigma. It is a cumbersome interruption of our workflow, rather like stopping to refill the car with gas. Every minute spent eating is a minute that could and should be spent being productive and making money. My husband jokes about the American male who eats over the sink. Ah, in jest there is truth. People eat over the sink, at work cubicles, in class, on the phone, while driving and commuting. Maybe you’re reading this book on an airplane while munching on a bag of nuts, which you will later tonight refer to as lunch.

    If eating is a lost art, cooking is dead. No longer a legitimate part of our lifestyle, cooking is demoted to a luxury hobby. Some consider cooking indulgent, and some people even consider it inferior and submissive. A parent who spends time cooking is an archaic homebody who could be out there in the real world earning a living with a career, really providing for the family. Some people just think it’s too expensive to cook. Consequently, young people miss learning this invaluable life skill.

    Learning practical skills from family, like cooking, has been replaced by the modern activities of screens, organized sports, and monitored play dates. Parents spend more time observing their children, yet less time interacting with and teaching them. In the past, when kids weren’t learning skills from their parents, they were as far away from their parents as possible. Parents used to kick kids out the door after breakfast with a perfunctory, Go play, expecting them to return home only for lunch and dinner. The rest of the time was spent playing in the neighborhood.

    Life for kids used to be a freer time. They moved their bodies and breathed outside air. Kids learned how to be kids through other kids. They learned social behavior through games like Kick the Can and Capture the Flag or they made up their own games. Kids made the rules and regulated them, redirecting each other. My father told me that if a parent came by to intervene, kids would gather up their stuff and move to another field.

    Parents now organize everything for their Precious Flowers. Today’s parents may protest, The world is more dangerous nowadays. Children need constant supervision. For the majority of US citizens, most of the time, life is not life-threatening. Unless you are growing up near the Gaza strip or in a developing nation (one might consider the urban projects as developing nations), life is pretty peachy with occasional shocking incidents. No child should be observed 100 percent of the time. Even prison inmates have moments of privacy.

    My generation grew up with one television. One. It was located in this thing called a family room, where families converged together, at the same time, in human form. Everyone watched the same thing. Show selection was controlled by adults and TV time limited. If you didn’t like the show, you didn’t watch television. Video games didn’t exist. Only the occasional war movie or western television show would offer that much violence. If you wanted to engage in combat, you did it outside, in person, with the rest of the neighborhood kids. When inside, we played quietly: card and board games, playing with dolls (action figures), puzzles, and reading. Modern quiet time is primarily screen time.

    Telephone use was vastly limited, compared to modern modality. Phones were auditory; you talked and listened only, with no texting or photos. Phones had cords attached to separate receivers, so you were landlocked in a room. My friends and I would invent code words during phone conversations. The stars are shining, was code for My folks are in the room. If I said, Apple pie? that meant, Did you go all the way? (Kids, we didn’t hook up. We went all the way.) People shared the phone line and scheduled times to talk. (Even weirder is how our folks shared telephone lines with neighbors, which actually seems more like today’s internet).

    Phones didn’t exist in college, except for pay phones. Without cell phones or email, students had to use corded dormitory phones located in the hallways. Students were confined to leaning against the wall, like Will in Good Will Hunting, David in War Games, and more recently, Piper, in Orange is the New Black. Some privileged students had telephones in their dorm rooms, but these phones were corded, too. Because there were no personal cell phones, there were no phone distractions in the classroom. If professors were boring, students had to resort to a rudimentary distractive technique known as doodling.

    Before electronic mail, people wrote letters, with writing implements called pens and paper. You would write a letter, mail it, and wait. A few days later, your recipient would receive it. A few days later, they would reply and mail their letter. And a few days after that, you would receive their reply. I imagine that sounds a bit like the Pony Express did to our generation.

    These small details were huge, in terms of communication. You had to actively plan when to have a phone conversation. Parents and long-distance partners would schedule weekly check-in dates, for example, Sundays at 7:00 pm. With no computers or cell phones, there was no texting. Parents could not constantly text, Where are you? and What are you doing? Contact was not the instantaneous luxury of today; making contact was an intentional act. (While dating, my grandparents would talk weekly on the phone. In anticipation for her conversation, Grandma Esther would dress in a preciously light voile dress, which she accessorized with delicate yellow silk stockings.)

    Without screens, students went to the library to study. They relied on printed media for academic information: books, journals, magazines, and articles. The library’s resource room was utilized for its informational tomes instead of its contemporary function of hosting napping graduate students. Without computers, there was no Google. One had to physically seek out information, ask someone, or look it up in a book. Family and school were primary sources of information and values formation. Without the web and streaming shows, screens were limited to television’s fixed schedules (no TiVo). Students rarely had their own televisions in their rooms; instead, they watched television in the residential lounges. Video games did not exist, so there was no temptation to stay up all night playing.

    College was still considered a privilege rather than an expectation, and fewer people attended. Higher education was an expensive lengthy luxury for those who wanted to enter specific professional fields or had expendable funds to expand their intellect. The remaining population worked.

    In previous generations, if you were learning-challenged, you typically did not attend college. If you did, you worked twice as hard and still struggled mightily. There were no learning disabilities, or rather, they were not legally recognized. I tell my students, When I was in high school, there was no ADHD. You were just considered an ass.

    Learning disabilities (LD) were legally recognized in 1973, but similar to most civil rights, were slow to gain implementation. For a culture to change, it needs a few million people to shake their heads yes or no, in unison. Back then, most people just shrugged their shoulders at the mention of an LD. In the 80s, knowledge of LD was as rare as AIDS, and news of its diagnosis received as warmly.

    * * *

    Since the 70s, every decade brought an increase in technology, college attendance, and LD awareness, until a tipping point seems to have been reached. Students are expected to attend college and use technology. Everyone has heard of LDs and many students have some diagnosis: an LD; behavioral disorder such as ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) or CD (Conduct Disorder); some diagnosis that affects the learning process like depression, stress, or anxiety disorders. If students do not have a diagnosis, they know someone who does. Test the hypothesis. Does anyone in your family have at least one such diagnosis? No? Do they know someone? Sure they do.

    With an odd combination of crazybusy culture, sedentary lifestyle, and an increase in learning and behavioral diagnoses

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